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Navigating The Passes

By Katharine Niles

Found in: | Inside | Wellness |

"[I] held tight to my fantasies and dreams - found in books, in archeology, in whatever was not my family since my family had rendered me effectively homeless."

I grew up driving mountain passes, and because it was the one place I trusted my father to keep me alive - as opposed to slaying me in myriad ways with incest - I came to feel at home there.

He had a big blue 1965 GMC Suburban that he nursed for 20 years. It was the quintessential car of my childhood. In my dreams, it is the symbol of him, the thing that, when it shows up, lets me know I am dealing with his repercussions even if he personally never appears. He often does not appear. This is both because he is still hard for me to look at head on, and because he, having this evil propensity born out of need, ignorance, chemical make-up, and god knows what else, does not want to be seen.

In the worst years of my treatment at his hands, from ages nine through 11, we lived in Durango, Colo., and my mother took a job, weekly, flying over the Rockies in Frontier Airlines prop jets, so she could teach a class at Denver University. The college where my father taught did not at that time hire "faculty wives," and my mother, with a Yale Ph.D., was both insulted and stir-crazy. She was also profoundly depressed at that time, and I can't help but think it had something to do with my father's behavior. Sometimes, though, we drove over to Denver to meet her. I don't remember the circumstances of this - why we did this when she normally flew home - but one of my clearest early memories of a mountain pass experience was driving up Wolf Creek in a snowstorm, and stopping at the top because my brother and I had to pee.

"There's three things ya never wanna do," my dad said, effecting a poorly executed Brooklyn accent as we got out of the car in strong winds. "Piss into da wind, fence wid Zorro, and mess wid me." So we did not piss into the wind, never had a chance to fence with Zorro though we moved to Los Angeles later on, and he messed with us, not the other way around. Still, that's a fond memory. It's fond because my father's humor was something that always endeared me to him, and because it was snowing heavily and he got us over that pass without a slither.

Since we moved a lot, travel was frequent. If we weren't moving, we drove back east in the summer, to teach or to see my mother's side of the family. Our father always drove as my mother was afraid of high speeds, and our moves always involved Rocky Mountain terrain - from Golden, Colo., to Prescott, Ariz., to Carbondale, Colo., to Durango. One trip from Carbondale down to Durango involved going over Lizard Head pass south of Telluride, since Red Mountain was closed. I had done my usual thing on car trips, which was to sequester in the far back, behind the back seat, even, with a packing blanket beneath me and a Nancy Drew mystery. I must have read 'til it began to grow dark, and then held tight to my fantasies and dreams - found in books, in archeology, in whatever was not my family since my family had rendered me effectively homeless. I popped up now and then to view the snowy terrain out the window. I remember an RV off the road. Other cars sliding to a stop. But my father, in that rear-wheel-drive Suburban without chains, crept on through and we made it home.

I now teach where my father taught. I live in Durango and have for eight years. Some might wonder, and probably have, when I mention that the worst years of my abuse happened here, why I've come back. I've wondered myself, if I have done nothing but chase my father's ghost of a heart all over the West, since I was so desperate to have him see me. If he saw me, truly saw me, the abuse would stop, my child self reasoned, and I was right about that. But the abuse came out of some place he was blind to, and so he never saw me. He saw his college students, and the canyons in Utah, and the Sierra Nevada, where he first learned to backpack. So I did think, parts of me, for a long time, that if I shared these interests he might then relish me in some way as to treat me differently.

However, mainly what I did - and it has taken me all of my life to recognize this and credit myself - was to build my own world from the scrap heaps of what he loved, and mostly from what I discovered I loved. I no longer fear the scrap heaps as some sort of collusional bargain with a narcissistic perpetrator, though the victims of such must go through loop after loop, year after year, of reckoning with this. Rather, after the abuse stopped and we'd moved to southern California, the land of his childhood, my father and I became, oddly, friends.

Or maybe it isn't so odd. What I became, really, and in the aftermath of his pedophilia, was his wife. Emotional incest, after all, is even more prevalent than the epidemic of physical incest; it's base and low and stupid and common. But it also hooked my heart. If he terrified me before age 11 or 12, he enchanted me from age 13 on. He enchanted all my friends. He was funny, and handsome, and liberal-minded. He went on Backpacking Club outings with me; he came to our swim meets when Mom would not; he pruned the yard methodically and seemingly happily in blue shorts and Converse tennis shoes. He went off each spring to Canyonlands with his former students, and loved, I knew, an underbelly L.A. that later I came to understand had much to do with his perversion but gave me permission, in turn, to love that underbelly too. I became the perfect anthropologist, both drawn and repelled by Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, hookers patrolling and drunks reeling in dark corners. When I could drive, my friends and I sought out clubs undergoing a punk revival, and though I was surrounded by drug abuse and messed up kids, I never went there myself. I did go to sex, of course. I was a trained seal for that. But the rest - no. I loved the music, the punk social message, the chance to dress up in fishnet stockings and pogo around a dance floor. This accomplished two things: rebellion against my mother and tacit coherence with my father.

So it is here that I feel how wrong the match between my parents was. My mother and father had nothing in common save academic careers. My mother should have married a kindly easterner who shared a tamer vision of reality and moved east. My father - if only he had released himself to love whom he really wanted to love, which I suspect was either a man or a far freer woman. I ache with a vision that has never occurred, a dream of mine in which I get to visit him in San Francisco, where he and his lover and I walk up Russian Hill and gaze off into the Golden Gate headlands. He can own his daughter there, without the rage that propelled him to abuse, and without the adolescent humor and outlook that I befriended in high school. But he did not come from a line of free women. Nor from a culture that would understand bisexuality or much, frankly, about truly mature manhood. And underbelly L.A. got him during the Depression and never let go.

I have to avoid Red Mountain Pass once again. My friend Tina and I are heading to an experiential education conference at my third-grade home, Colorado Rocky Mountain School. It is April and snowing. We leave at 3 p.m. after Tina gets done with class, and head out over Lizard Head. The point at which snow sticks to the road is high, and we learn later we could have made it over Red Mountain just fine, but Red Mountain is a god you revere and stay away from when the snow clouds fly. Snowplow drivers lose their lives on Red Mountain, to sudden avalanches and abominably narrow roads. In places above Ouray, there are no guardrails because it is only without them that the plows can get through. Reflector staffs lean off into the chasm of the Uncompaghre. Erosion nibbles away at the tenuous white line painted to delineate a shoulder that does not exist. This only goes on for several miles; above that are hairpin turns, old mines with structures people fight to preserve, tailings piles, tree line, summit. It is not so scary there. But it is still treacherous, and in order to get there from Durango you must also summit Coal Bank and Molas passes. So we go around.

In Rico we go pee and meet a man in a wheel chair and a woman who runs the counter. They guard nicest bathrooms I've ever seen in a gas station. Tina buys wasabi peas and we get back in the car. We talk of the end of the world. Of no oil, of systems that must collapse, of our country's idiocy in the face of global warming and resource depletion. We do this in her rattle trap Kia SUV with a heater that makes a sound like a prop jet. We are, of course, fueled by oil, going to a conference fueled by oil.

Lizard Head, Sawpit, Dallas Divide, Ridgway. At Ridgway we eat dinner at a Thai place that has been open since December and boasts much oriental d�cor and a woman eating there in a fur coat. Aspen comes to Ridgway, I think, and know that in my childhood there would have been no Thai restaurant, nor a woman in a fur coat. There would be no ranches broken up into 35-acre parcels and sold to wealthy second-homers. Ralph Lauren and Dennis Weaver own spreads near here. And to my mind, to wear a fur coat is rather like driving a Hummer - you might as well post a sign on your back that says, "Hi, I'm an asshole." Yet I am not totally old school, because the Thai food is delicious, not too expensive, and a welcome healthy change from the road food I was anticipating. I drink gunpowder tea for caffeine purposes, and take over the helm until Delta, whence we get gas - okay, oil - and Tina takes over again because her four-wheel-drive mechanism is tricky and we anticipate snow up McClure.

We get snow up McClure. But first we pass huge coal mines we didn't know were still in operation. Dark now, their swooping chutes and boxy towers are delineated by electricity, by a coal mine's version of Christmas lights outlining winter windows. I am reminded that the year I lived in Carbondale - from August of 1970 to August of 1971 - it was a town of 500 full of potato farmers, ranchers and (mostly) coal miners. But Tina has a different response, and I follow her. Wow, we say. This would be great for our Value of Place summer class, where we talk about sustainability and globalization and resource procurement and indigenous models of living on the Earth. We talk of permaculture, and the role of story and art and gender and war. We both imagine taking students on a tour of this mine.

Value of Place. On top of the pass, in unplowed snowpack, elk swarm the sides of the road. We slow down, and in an exhibition of the most common form of human gratitude, ooh and aah: Wow, look at that. Wow, there's a lot of them. Wow, check out that guy. Off the top shoulder of the pass, though, a Subaru is stopped, midslide, lights flashing. We slow, roll down our window.

"Are you all right?"

The woman is holding a dog. "Yes. My friend went to get help with another car, and they should be along shortly. We've had quite the time."

For some reason we don't ask for details. But Tina asks again if she is sure help is coming. "Yes," says the woman.

So we continue on, down through the snow though not far past the Subaru it turns to slush and we understand she lost her sense of safety just after it congealed to real snowpack. Where are the plows, we wonder? But we are glad to see cars heading up, since it means others will find the Subaru.

McClure. Following the Crystal River cutting down through the flanks of Sopris. No more sacred a river or mountain exists for me. Carbondale and Colorado Rocky Mountain School provided the happiest year of my childhood. I was free to roam a campus with other faculty kids and a cafeteria full of food not tied to home. Other parents fed me cookies. We sat by irrigation ditches in springtime and popped dandelion heads into them. I wasn't supposed to go to the river. When I was eight, the fear of it was rightfully instilled in me by grownups who insisted we never go there without adult supervision. So I listened to it out my bedroom window at night, and went down to it only when my uncle Clif visited and caught two trout near the bridge. Clif spelled his name with one F and even had a license that said "ONE F" on it. He slicked back his hair in Pat Riley fashion and worked as a machinist all his life. I remember the trout he caught when I go back to the river by the bridge during the conference. He gutted them, and I remember gleaming blood and fish scales. The river's low now, a dry year with what snowmelt there will be yet to come. In my year there, it must have been wet. Or at least I recall the rivers and ditches at swollen points.

Sopris dominates the valley far more than I remember. It's almost Northwestern, like Rainier or Mt. Hood. Though there is much topography all around, it reigns alone to its north, toward the valley, unstrung from peaks behind it to the south and east. I meditate under its bulk, sitting high above the river next to some sage. I feel veins of gold shooting through my heart, and then, yes, flashes of traveling with my husband, with Jonathan. Fifteen years of car trips, of being together, going places. I don't understand the car-trip imagery until writing this, until I realize that going on a trip with him has supplanted the trips done with my father at the helm. And for the first time I feel that my relationship with a human being might just be as beautiful as Sopris and the river and Colorado always were to me. I was fortunate to understand beauty given the ugliness in my home. The mountains taught me that, the glint of snowfields and new green grass and the delight of cottonwoods in full summer foliage. Horses in wet pastures. Marmots on rocks. Skiing, which is an exercise in Zen meditation with snow-covered rock. Green pools in redrock canyons. Gypsum crystals, mica, feldspar, the smell of pi�on and juniper. Bird bones at the base of telephone poles. Kayakers navigating river gates. Big water in spring. Alfalfa sweetgrass meadowlark sing ponderosa pine smell of vanilla on a hot day wild turkey Jonathan how you have stuck with me my stocky man my God.

I start to sob. Chest-work, the gold working its way 'til I can begin to write this, this first piece where I talk about the good things my father left me instead of the pain. The schizophrenia of the past six months has been excruciating. One minute I am in a rage and convinced my sometimes childlike good friend, who is a bisexual, charming, brilliant male like my dad, is as evil as he is. The next minute, though, I can hold that friendship, and grieve the other love affair I had, with a married man who tore at me in a similar way. Who loved me but could never own it. Who grimaced in pain as I left him after a visit and later admitted he thought of living with me every day of his life, but could never move toward it. He thinks my son, by Jonathan, is his. Or he wants that. After years of silence I find out he has left things for me, for my son, in his will. So I get him in death, not life. I am, as I was with my father, made the illicit wife in spite of my every protest.

The right side of me is the one filled with love, the teenaged me, the one who had a friendship with her father she has missed all her life. The left is enraged, terrified, younger, abused. How does a woman hold a father like that, what orb can she hold up in her mystical hands, what crystal ball that reflects herself back accurately, and him too? How complete must I become, suturing right to left from my sternum on up to my vocal cords, my mouth, my mind, so that what emits from me - bellows, hallelujahs, tears, words - is true and whole? Because my relationship with my husband, who is not split, has come to that middle path, is lovely and complete and untraumatic and still interesting. And the childlike good friend - he has surprised me so much in his growth lately, and I love him too much to inflict my crap on him, that I must find a way to come to center with him too.

Which means getting back to Dad. I have a picture of us, when I was a baby. He is sitting at his desk and lifting me up over his head. We are both smiling and looking at each other, entranced. Right there, Dad. Right there. It started there, in Gainesville, Florida, where I was born but lived just over a year. I became a mountain girl, not a Gator. But I have a baby memory of being on the hot Alachua County porch and sensing humidity and green, the subtropical savannah-jungle that is Florida. So, see, Dad, I'd tapped into the Universe, the Big Love, even then. I was born with it. It got me through. It got me feeling mountains and knowing beauty in spite of you, later on. And the heartache was knowing you felt it too, otherwise you wouldn't have been chasing your soul down Utah canyons or up Mount Whitney. But you betrayed it, as most people in this Big Oil mess of an imperial, raping patriarchy do. God dammit Dad. God damn.

Driving home, McClure is clear and the apple trees are blooming in Paonia. It is sunny and in the 60s, and at Red Mountain we still get stuck. They are pulling a car up that went over in the snow midweek. We go back to the town of Ouray. Hike up to Cascade Falls. Get back in the car. Wait another forty-five minutes, grading papers and discussing our summer class, while the tow truck winches the car up the side. The air is sunlit and lovely and I hang my toes out the car window. To my right, no more than 10 feet, plummets the canyon of the Uncompaghre.

When we finally get through, we see the car. It went off at the steepest, narrowest point possible. My nightmare, what happens when the gods of Red Mountain are not listened to. The driver, says the flag lady, ejected and died. The car is the most mangled piece of equipment I have ever seen. One of its axles is completely off.

I close my eyes. Life and death in the high territories of the Colorado Rockies, even in 2006. My father and I know about this. Is that car us? Partly, yes.

I pick up a pen. He is 75. What must I tell him before he dies?

Katharine Niles is the author of the award-winning novel The Basket Maker.